Imagine a futuristic world where one can travel through time. Go into the past and take a ride on some dinosaurs, or go into the future and get oneself a hoverboard. When the day comes, time travel can become mankind’s reality, but should our species should take the step to decide whether it is safe or not. The short story A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury is about a hunter, called Eckels, as he journies into the dinosaur age. The hunter disobeys from rules to follow and ends up changing the present. In the story, Time Safari is the organization that allows time travel. The government needs to ban time travel because it is extremely dangerous and not ethical.
There are so many dangers of the time, this essay would be overflown if all the consequences were listed. First of all, a small minuscule change in the past can lead to catastrophic events. As shown in the story, even an event so small such as Eckels killing a single butterfly can change the English language and even alter a presidential election. This effect is known as the Domino Effect. In the story, the travel leader states how killing a single mouse can cause a fox to lose its food. This starved fox will no longer be the food for a lion, and when humans come, the lion that was hunted for food never existed. Even an accident such as killing a mouse can cause humans to go extinct. No government in the right mind would allow anyone to change time to their liking. Additionally, time-traveling also creates alternate timelines. In the story when Eckels returned from his trip, the world he lived in had an altered language and presidential election. Eckels now lives in this alternate timeline, but the timeline where the butterfly was never killed still exists. Just as simple as that, Eckels unknowingly created an entirely new universe. As the government, they need to ban time travel to prevent such disasters from happening.
Not only does time travel introduce many new dangers to humanity, but it also is completely unethical. Some characteristics of unethical behaviors include serious manipulation, robbery, murder, human experiments. With the addition of time travel, all of these behaviors can be achieved with little to no difficulty. Time travel will theoretically bring along the ability to see the future. With this ability, one can see possible outcomes, and avoid those which bring one failure. Infinitely avoiding failure can help people rob banks, murder people, and opens an entire gallery of easy-to-perform unethical actions. Furthermore, with everyone altering time to their willingness, million of alternate timelines will be created every day, causing the entire planet Earth to be manipulated. Time travel is extremely unethical and needs to be banned. If the world miraculously comes up with a way to connect timelines and create a network of time, time travel could become an option, but only if the government prohibits the action of committing unethical acts.
Skeptics argue time travel would be a blast for those with curious minds and are eager to see the past and future. Critics also state time travel should be allowed if the creation of alternate timelines can be prevented, but this assumption is feeble-minded. As previously, stated the act of traveling through time even for a millisecond can completely change the universe. For example, if one travels into the past and breaths, a virus can travel into the past atmosphere. This virus causes no harm to live beings in the present, but it could eliminate entire species in the past because basically nothing has immunity to it. Even if one doesn’t breathe, somehow, dead skin cells can fall on the ground and cause changes. Some people are so curious to time travel, they’d die for it, but that would still create an alternate timeline, which is harmful to the entirety of humanity, not just the single individual.
Although time travel seems wonderful, one has to first consider the consequences. Time travel is extremely dangerous as a small change can cause catastrophic events and it will also create alternate timelines. Time travel is also extremely unethical. Should time travel be banned and humans live life normally, or should time travel be allowed and arise chaos everywhere? The decision is obvious.